Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a type of anxiety disorder that is triggered by experiencing or witnessing an event that causes intense fear, helplessness, or horror such as a car accident, a rape, fighting in a war, or a national disaster. Having a strong reaction to trauma is completely normal and expected, but PTSD involves an overwhelming reaction of the body's normal psychological defenses against stress. So after the trauma, your body has a hard time coping with regular stressful situations.

PTSD sufferers re-experience the traumatic event or events in some way, tend to avoid places, people, or other things that remind them of the event (avoidance), and are exquisitely sensitive to normal life experiences (hyperarousal).

People who develop PTSD may experience complete disruption of their once normal lives, and PTSD-related symptoms can get progressively worse, last for months, or even last for tens of years.

Females are twice as likely to have PTSD as men.

There are regions of the brain involved in memory processing that are implicated in PTSD, and these include the hippocampus, amygdala and frontal cortex. The heightened stress response caused by the traumatic event is likely to involve the thalamus, hypothalamus and locus coeruleus.

Not everybody who experiences psychological and/or physical trauma develops the disorder. Research now suggests that perhaps up to 40% of the risk for PTSD is genetically inherited.

Scientists have noticed that people with PTSD tended to have a smaller-than-average hippocampus (genetic predisposition), an area of the brain involved with memory, coupled with a with stress-associated decrease in the size of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain active in inhibiting the fear response.

Also, it has been demonstrated that lower-than-average circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol is a factor associated with PTSD.

Research indicates that the protien produced by the FKB5P gene facilitates the binding of stress hormones (like cortisol) with their receptors on brain cells and, thus, helps regulate the brain’s response to stress. People with certain genetic variations in this stress-related gene are significantly more likely to develop PTSD symptoms when placed in stressful situations.

Other research has found that the amygdala, a brain region involved in the fear response, can become hyperactive in PTSD. There are certain clusters of amygdala cells known as intercalated neurons that appear to be essential to the process of forgetting intense emotions that accompany trauma (the fear extinction process). Unfortunately, when these intercalated neurons function poorly the amygdala becomes hyperactive, and this may explain why people with PTSD have an inability to learn how to forget the intense emotions that accompany their initial trauma.

Additionally, people with PTSD have elevated levels of norepinephrine (NE), a neurochemical involved in arousal and stress. High levels of norepinephrine strengthen the emotional reactions of the amygdala while at the same time weakening the function of the prefrontal cortex, which normally allows suppression of troubling memories and thoughts.

Post-traumatic stress disorder appears at high rates among veterans. For example, 84 % of U.S. POWs held by Japan during World War II had PTSD symptoms at one time or another, and 59 % were still suffering PTSD symptoms in the 1990's. Therefore it has been postulated that PTSD is a normal, not abnormal, response to the experience of combat and being a POW.

women with histories of abuse, difficult miscarriage, or abortion have a high risk for PTSD, and Post-traumatic stress disorder during pregnancy is associated with maternal risk behaviors (e.g., smoking, substance use) and adverse neonatal and maternal outcomes.

Cancer survivors are at high risk of having PTSD.

There is obviously no prevention for traumatic events as they are unpredictable, but if you have been a victim of a traumatic experience, talk to someone, and if you are having PTSD-like symptoms, then see a healthcare provider.